Regular readers may know Pontydysgu have been involved in different European projects around the use of technology in education, the training of teachers and trainers and careers advice and counselling (amongst others) since 2000, working with partners from virtually every EU member state.

Obviously the decision of the UK to leave the European Union has a major impact on our work. Although we have had offices and employees working in Germany and Wales since the company was founded (and more recently in Spain), Pontydysgu is registered as a UK company. Therefore, we have set up a new company – Pontydysgu SL, registered in Spain.

We will continue to maintain the UK based company. However if you would be interested in working with us on European projects through our Spanish company we will be very happy to talk with you. Pontydysgu SL will build on the outputs and work of the UK company and the expertise of staff from Pontydysgu Ltd. will transfer to the new Spanish company. We are now working on establishing a Spanish web site and in making the outputs of our work available through this site. Over time we will be relaunching this web site as Pontydysgu.eu to reflect our new direction.

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News Bites

Open Educational Resources

BYU researcher John Hilton has published a new study on OER, student efficacy, and user perceptions – a synthesis of research published between 2015 and 2018. Looking at sixteen efficacy and twenty perception studies involving over 120,000 students or faculty, the study’s results suggest that students achieve the same or better learning outcomes when using OER while saving a significant amount of money, and that the majority of faculty and students who’ve used OER had a positive experience and would do so again.

Digital Literacy

A National Survey fin Wales in 2017-18 showed that 15% of adults (aged 16 and over) in Wales do not regularly use the internet. However, this figure is much higher (26%) amongst people with a limiting long-standing illness, disability or infirmity.

A new Welsh Government programme has been launched which will work with organisations across Wales, in order to help people increase their confidence using digital technology, with the aim of helping them improve and manage their health and well-being.

Digital Communities Wales: Digital Confidence, Health and Well-being, follows on from the initial Digital Communities Wales (DCW) programme which enabled 62,500 people to reap the benefits of going online in the last two years.

Figures from the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency show that in total almost 11,500 people – both academics and support staff – working in universities on a standard basis were on a zero-hours contract in 2017-18, out of a total staff head count of about 430,000, reports the Times Higher Education. Zero-hours contract means the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours

Separate figures that only look at the number of people who are employed on “atypical” academic contracts (such as people working on projects) show that 23 per cent of them, or just over 16,000, had a zero-hours contract.

Resistance decreases over time

Interesting research on student centered learning and student buy in, as picked up by an article in Inside Higher Ed. A new study published in PLOS ONE, called “Knowing Is Half the Battle: Assessments of Both Student Perception and Performance Are Necessary to Successfully Evaluate Curricular Transformation finds that student resistance to curriculum innovation decreases over time as it becomes the institutional norm, and that students increasingly link active learning to their learning gains over time